Iraq, Palestine, and U.S. Imperialism

by Toufic Haddad

International Socialist Review,
July/August 2004

The U.S. antiwar movement recently adopted
the issue of Palestine as a point of unity; prominently declaring
that on March 20, 2004, protesters across America would march
beneath the banner, "End colonial occupations from Iraq to
Palestine to everywhere." This came in large part as a result
of a letter addressed to the broader antiwar community on behalf
of Arab and Muslim organizations announcing that these groups
would no longer accept the de-linking of Palestine and the occupation
of Iraq in the U.S. antiwar movement. The statement declared that
the struggle in Palestine must be "central to any peace and
justice mobilization."

However, the letter is notably vague about
the relationship between the struggles in Palestine and Iraq beyond
proclamations that "both peoples have paid dearly in confronting
war and occupation." This article seeks to clarify what indeed
are the connections between the Palestinian and Iraqi struggles,
situating both within the framework of current U.S. imperial objectives.
This is necessary because both occupations are key components
of the U.S. Middle East strategy. The American ruling establishment
has already invested billions of dollars in both, and has shown
a willingness to sacrifice the lives of U.S. soldiers in Iraq.
The U.S.-funded Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip
has been underway for almost thirty-seven years, and has cost
U.S. taxpayers around $5 billion a year. As for Iraq, top U.S.
officials have no qualms about declaring the occupation-the cost
of which is already running into the hundreds of billions-a long-term
endeavor. As former occupation chief in Iraq General Jay Garner
[Ret.] recently put it, "One of the most important things
we can do right now is start getting basing rights .... Look back
on the Philippines around the turn of the 20th century. They were
a coaling station for the Navy .... That's what Iraq is for the
next few decades: our coaling station that gives us great presence
in the Middle East.

Understanding how Iraq and Palestine fit
together is made all the more important by the fact that after
September 11, and the more recent U.S. occupation of Iraq, the
architecture of U.S. imperial policies has entered a significant
new era that Bush administration officials are heralding as the
advent of "a new Middle East." Though the classic U.S.
imperial objectives in the region remain unchanged, new methods
and tactics are being devised to consolidate these objectives,
which in part are aimed at addressing both old and new structural
weaknesses and threats to U.S. hegemony. Clarification of these
issues is thus of utmost necessity so activists know best how
to strategize and focus their energies for the task at hand.

From Iraq to Palestine: Similarities

On one level, the comparison between the
occupations is straightforward. Indeed, all occupying armies,
if their occupations are to last, must inevitably develop certain
techniques of "counterinsurgency." But there is more
than coincidence in the techniques both the Israeli and U.S. occupying
armies are using to suppress popular resistance. U.S. techniques
in Iraq are unmistakably similar to Israeli techniques in the
1967 Occupied Territories because of the active cooperation between
Israeli military advisers and the Americans on the ground. It
is worth mentioning some of these common techniques while not
forgetting the terribly destructive effect they have on the daily
lives of Iraqis and Palestinians. They include: the use of aggressive
techniques of urban warfare with an emphasis on special units,
house-to-house searches, wide-scale arrest campaigns (almost 14,000
Iraqis are now in prison), and torture; the erecting of an elaborate
system of watchtowers, military bases, checkpoints, barbed wire,
and trenches to monitor, control, and restrict transportation
and movement; the clearing of wide swaths of land next to roads;
the use of armored bulldozers to destroy the houses of suspected
militants; the razing of entire fields from which militants might
seek refuge; the heightened relevance of snipers and unmanned
drones; and the attempted erection of collaborator networks to
extract information from the local population about resistance
activities-both military and political.

Indeed, the techniques Israel has developed
over the years in suppressing Palestinian resistance, and most
recently in urban warfare throughout the course of the Al Aqsa
Intifada, have proven invaluable for many states attempting to
crush insurrections-Colombia (leftist guerrillas), Turkey (Kurds),
India (Kashmir), Sri Lanka (Tamil liberation movements), and Indonesia
(East Timor), to name just a few. The U.S., anxious to rid itself
of the hangover of the "Vietnam syndrome," and more
recently the "Somalia syndrome," value this expertise
just as highly. Cooperation in urban warfare techniques with Israeli
military generals both on the logistic level and on the ground
in Israeli training camps pre-dates the most recent Iraq campaign.
For example, a detailed lecture on urban warfare is featured by
Brigadier General Gideon Avidor in a Rand Corporation publication
entitled "Ready for Armageddon" in which other top military
brass (both U.S. and international) seek to learn from the Israeli
experiences of urban warfare. As the Iraqi occupation cooperation
is surfacing. Pulitzer prize continues, increasing evidence of
this winning author Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker magazine writes,
"According to American and Israeli military and intelligence
officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been
working closely with their American counterparts at the Special
Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel
to help them prepare for operations in Iraq." One of the
operations formulated with the "ad hoc Israeli commandos
advisers" is "called 'pre-emptive manhunting' by one
Pentagon adviser" and has "the potential to turn into
another Phoenix Program"-a reference to the counterinsurgency
program the U.S. adopted during the Vietnam War, in which Special
Forces were sent out to capture or assassinate Vietnamese believed
to be working with or sympathetic to the Vietcong. Operation Phoenix
resulted in the killing of at least 60,000 victims between 1968
and 1972.

The similarity between the two occupations
isn't limited to one of mere technique, but also includes the
way in which U.S. actions are framed and justified. As Palestinian
thinker (and Israeli member of Parliament) Azmi Bishara has noted,
the "war against terror" and particularly the recent
invasion of Iraq was waged using the logic of "globalized
Israeli security doctrines. For example, 'the pre-emptive strike'
or the 'preventative war.' These conceptions are actually Israeli
conceptions, including understanding 'terrorism' as the 'main
enemy." Bishara explains, "Israel's central doctrine
was to divide the world into 'terrorists' and 'anti-terrorists'..
.so that it could be on the side of Russia, India and the United
States together. Everybody is fighting terrorism.' This enables
Israel to break its isolation. Israel is on one side, the entire
Arab world is on the other."'

Important differences: Palestine and the
inadequacy of terminology

Despite all these similarities, it is
important to understand that differences exist. The U.S. occupation
of Iraq is by no means a carbon copy of Israeli practices against
the Palestinians. Each occupation plays a different role in U.S.
imperial objectives. Moreover, limiting the discussion to occupation
does a disservice to what is actually taking place in both cases,
and obfuscates the clarity needed for real action.

To start with, the word "occupation"
is commonly used to refer to the occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza that began in 1967. Though Palestinians actively resist this
occupation (and have since it started), they also actively reject
the limiting of their cause to the question of this occupation
alone. In fact, the Palestinian national liberation movement began
in the Ottoman era (pre-First World War) and crystallized in the
years of the British mandate (1920-1948). The modern national
movement (embodied in the Palestine Liberation Organization, PLO)
was established in 1964-three years before the 1967 occupation,
and began as a movement of refugees, expelled by Zionist armies
from Palestine in 1948, who sought to lead the return of the Palestinian
people back to their lands and homes. The word "occupation,"
in this instance, bears no reference to the Nakba (Arabic for
catastrophe), the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948 in which
530 Palestinian cities, towns, and villages were depopulated.
Nor does it shed any light on the nature of the Zionist movement
or the exclusive Jewish state it established, which is discriminatory
and racist by its very nature against non-Jews. Furthermore, occupation
bears no reference to the struggle of the more than one million
Palestinians inside Israel who are citizens of the state, and
who today are at the very heart of the anti-Zionist struggle,
as the non-Jews in the Jewish state struggling for equality and
their national collective rights as the indigenous people of Palestine.

In fact, occupation has become a very
slippery word used for disingenuous political purposes. Israeli
Prime Minister Arid Sharon told the Likud Central Committee on
May 27, 2003, "I also believe that the thought and idea that
we can continue keeping under occupation-we might not like the
word, but it is occupation-3.5 million Palestinians, is very bad
for Israel, the Palestinians and Israel's economy."' Likewise,
Shimon Peres and Benjamin Netanyahu both proclaimed during the
Oslo years that Israel no longer occupied the Palestinians. Their
claim was that the direct occupation of Palestinians by the Israeli
army was over (because of Palestinian Authority, or PA, autonomy
in "Area A" during Oslo) or needed to end, but without
mentioning the occupation of Palestinian land.

Thus it is evident that the term "anti-occupation"
is a political catechism that cannot be allowed to go unqualified
if it is to be used in defense of Palestinian rights. This is
the precise mistake large parts of the European Left have made
vis-à-vis the Palestinian struggle, and the American Left
must be careful not to fall into this same trap. This has come
about largely as a result of them taking the lead from the Zionist
Left which forms the Israeli "peace camp" (and includes
groups from the more "establishment" Meretz Party and
Peace Now movement, to the more "radical" Gush Shalom
and Women in Black).

The Zionist Left's critique of Israel
and the occupation is limited to Israeli practices only after
1967. It categorically rejects the Palestinian refugees' right
of return (which has been passed by the UN General Assembly more
than 110 times since 1948). Furthermore, the Zionist Left has
no intention of raising the question of the racist and discriminatory
nature of Zionism, the formation of the Israeli state, or for
that matter, even the recognition of the rights and struggles
( of the Palestinian citizens of Israel. This misleading line
taken by the Zionist Left, or rather its intentional gerrymandering
of the "problem," is made worse by the negotiating tactics
of the 7 Palestinian Authority, which has promoted an approach
that only focuses on the 1967 occupation. This ambiguity surrounding
the term "occupation," and its use to obscure what is
at the heart of the Palestinian struggle, has been terribly destructive
to the Palestinian cause. In fact, it was precisely the illusion
that the problem was the occupation and that the "occupation
was ending" during the Oslo "peace process" between
1993 and 2000 that allowed much of the international community
to absolve itself of responsibility to the Palestinian cause,
at a time when in fact the Israeli occupation was deepening. The
present Intifada arose as a rejection of both the occupation and
the falsity that a peace process was taking place.

Limiting criticism of Israel to the occupation
continues to be a disservice to describing what is happening to
Palestinians both in the West Bank and inside Israel. Since the
Al Aqsa Intifada began at least 3,000 Palestinians have been killed
(as of the writing of this article), of whom more than 550 are
children and 200 are women, while 310 have been killed in political
assassinations. Almost 39,000 Palestinians have been wounded,
and more than 6,000 are in prison (437 of whom are children).
More than 5,100 homes have been completely destroyed and an additional
55,119 have been damaged. Forty-three schools alone have been
transformed into military bases. More than 15,000 acres of land
have been leveled, 982,000 trees uprooted, 12,848 sheep and goats
killed or poisoned, and 257 water wells destroyed completely.
If we compare in scale the American population of 280 million
to the Palestinian population of three million-a ratio of about
93:l-you begin to get a sense of the enormity of devastation taking
place. As a proportion of their total population, four times the
number of Palestinians have died than Americans were killed in
Vietnam.

This is to say nothing of the 370 kilometers
of wall that Israel is erecting around the West Bank. In fact,
the wall is a series of 8-meter-high concrete slabs, electric
fences, trenches, barbed-wire, patrol roads, and tracking paths.
Its ultimate purpose is to enforce what Israel terms "demographic
separation," while unilaterally annexing large swaths of
Palestinian land and water to Israel. Architects of the wall seek
to consolidate the long-held Zionist plan of establishing separate
islands of Palestinian autonomy similar to the South African Bantustans
on no more than 40 percent of the West Bank-a plan both Labor
and Likud governments have been united in implementing since the
1967 occupation began.

The 1948 Palestinians (who are citizens
of Israel) have also witnessed a sustained assault against their
livelihood. They too were brutally repressed at the outbreak of
the Intifada, with the Israeli police killing thirteen of them
before demonstrations in solidarity with their brethren in 1967
Palestine were quelled. Their second-class status also means that
they are subject to having their land confiscated, and their houses
demolished without recourse for the purpose of erecting Jewish-only
settlements. They have already had 97 percent of their land confiscated
from them, and they are unable to purchase land that is now owned
by Jewish Israelis due to sophisticated state laws that discriminate
against Arab ownership of land. Furthermore, not a day goes by
in Israel when Israeli politicians don't refer to them-not the
1967 Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza-as the existential
threat Israel faces, the so-called "demographic time bomb."
During the course of the Intifada, Israel has accelerated its
attempts to ghettoize them, too. It is presently engaged in trying
to force 70,000 Palestinians who live in unrecognized villages
in the south of the country by spraying their crops with defoliants.
Israel has also issued demolition orders against more than 6,000
homes of Palestinian citizens of Israel, claiming the homes were
built "illegally."

'What the limited framework of occupation
fails to capture is that Israel is presently engaged in an all-out
war against the entire Palestinian people, located across historical
Palestine. At minimum, this plan aims to erect an overt form of
apartheid, and in the worst-case scenario, could result in "transfer"
(the Israeli expression used for ethnic cleansing)-be it by force
(i.e., physical expulsion at gunpoint), or "willful"
(by preventing access by Palestinians to the necessities of life-health
care, education, work, water, food, family, etc.), forcing people
to leave.

Israel in the service of U.S. imperialism

Finally, but perhaps most importantly,
the inadequacy of the term "occupation" is made clear
not only vis-à-vis what is taking place on the ground in
Palestine (the micro level), but also vis-à-vis what Israel's
historic and present day role has been in relation to 'Western
imperialism (the macro level).

Israel's role, in the words of founding
Zionist thinker Theodore Hertzl in 1896, is to be "a bulwark
against Asia... an advance post of civilization against barbarism.
116 All Zionist leaders from the pre-state days to the present
have understood that loyalty to the objectives of Western imperialism
would guarantee support to the state, and domination over the
Arab world. Co-founder of the World Zionist Organization Max Nordau
explicitly declared this in a July 12, 1920 speech delivered at
Albert Hall in London. Describing the event, Nordau writes:

On stage were Mr. Balfour, Marquise Carew,
Lord Robert Cecil, members of the British Cabinet, MPs, and Politicians
.... I turned to the Ministers and said: During a dangerous moment
in the World War you thought that we, the Jews, could render you
a useful service. You turned to us, making promises that were
rather general but could be considered satisfactory. [This is
a reference to Lord Balfour's declaration promising the creation
of a Jewish state in Palestine in 191 7-TH.] We considered your
views and were loyal towards your proposals. We only want to continue.
We made a pact with you. We consider carefully the dangers and
commitments of this pact. We know what you hope to receive from
us. We must protect the Suez Canal for you. We shall be the guards
of your road to India as it passes through the Middle East. We
are ready to fulfill this difficult military role but this requires
that you permit us to become powerful so as to be able to fulfill
our role. Loyalty for loyalty, faithfulness in return for faithfulness.

After the 1967 war, U.S. imperialism replaced
Britain and France as Israel's backer. But the nature of this
relationship and of Israel's role has never changed, but rather
has expanded to include not only the protection of the Suez Canal,
but most importantly, the protection of Western access to Middle
East oil. As the establishment Israeli daily paper Haaretz wrote,

Israel is to become the watchdog. There
is no fear that Israel will undertake any aggressive policy towards
the Arab states when this would explicitly contradict the wishes
of the U.S. and Britain. But, if for any reasons the western powers
should sometimes prefer to close their eyes, Israel could be relied
upon to punish one or several neighboring states whose discourtesy
to the west went beyond the bounds of the permissible.'

Israel's principle purpose-indeed its
specialization-has been to subvert, suppress, uproot, and destroy
the forces of Arab nationalism to secure Western access to Arab
oil, once described by Washington as "the greatest prize
in human history." Arab nationalism was and continues to
be such a threat to the interests of Western imperialism, because
it is the sole force that calls for the self-determination of
the Arab peoples and their natural resources, thus threatening
to call into question the false divisions created by Western imperialism
which divided the Arab peoples into twenty-two states at the beginning
of the twentieth century.

In this endeavor Israel has worked tirelessly.
Though its most striking and best known accomplishment was its
surprise attack and defeat of the Pan-Arab movement of Gamal Abdel
Nasser in 1967-a demoralizing defeat that the Arab world has yet
to recover from-this is only the tip of the iceberg of what Israel
has undertaken to do away with any and all traces of the Arab
national movement. It is worth here briefly mentioning some of
this expansive and elaborate policy, as it is rarely given due
exposure.

Since its creation, Israel has engaged
and defeated different Arab regimes in major wars in 1948, 1956,
1967, 1973, and 1982. In all cases, with the exception of 1973,
Israel initiated the attacks. Israel has consistently supported
non-Arab states on the periphery of the Arab world in Turkey,
Iran, Kenya, and Ethiopia as a way to make sure that Arab states
engage in resource expenditure and defense against their neighbors.
This is known in Israeli "defense" lexicon as "Encirclement
Theory."

Israel has consistently supported both
ethnic and religious minorities within the Arab world, as a way
to break down Arab nationalism from within (known in Israeli lexicon
as the "Theory of Allying the Periphery"). It first
targeted Arab Jews (particularly in Iraq, Egypt, and Morocco),
even going so far as to plant bombs in synagogues and on Jewish-owned
property to provoke a wave of Arab Jewish immigration to Israel
in the early 1950s.9 Israel has also attempted to foment the rebellions
of other minority groups in Egypt (the Copts), Lebanon (the Maronites),
Iraq (the Kurds), and Sudan (Christians in the south) as a way
of weakening Arab nationalism. Israel even refuses to recognize
the Arab nationality of the more than one million Arab citizens
of Israel, instead officially registering them as Muslims, Christians,
and Druze.

Israel has come to the aid of pro-Western
Arab regimes, helping them defend themselves from internal Arab
nationalist movements. The most well-known example of this is
that of Jordan in 1970, when Israel threatened to intervene to
shore up the Jordanian monarchy in its attempts to suppress the
PLO. The Syrian army thought to put a stop to the massacre of
Palestinians by the Jordanian regime, but opted not to because
of Israel's threat that it would bomb Damascus. But this is not
the only case of Israel supporting a reactionary Arab regime to
put down the forces of Arab nationalism. Former head of the Israeli
Mossad, Shabtai Shavit explicitly confirmed that Israel supported
royalist forces in Yemen in their war against republican forces
throughout the 1960s. The Israeli aid consisted of parachuting
weapons to royalist forces and sending instructors to train them.
The Israeli motivation was the desire to weaken Egypt's Gamal
Abdel Nasser who supported the republican forces. As Haaretz noted:
"The Pan-Arab project of Nasser threatened the rule of Imperialism
in the region and, as Shavit explains: 'We did it in order to
be able to struggle against the worst of our enemies.' Moreover,
the interference in the civil war [in Yemen] was part of a comprehensive
strategic perception of the Mossad which endeavored to divide
the Arab world and find allies in the region."

Israel has directly and indirectly been
involved in the assassination of prominent and progressive Arab
nationalists for years, including senior Moroccan revolutionary
Mehdi Ben Barakeh in 1967, leaders and members of the National
Liberation Front in Algeria, as well as dozens of prominent revolutionaries
in the Lebanese and Palestinian national movements.

Israel has worked closely to prevent any
Arab regime from challenging its military advantage and hegemony
in the Middle East, particularly seeking to prevent the Arabs
from developing nuclear capabilities. Israel destroyed the Iraqi
reactor during its assembly in France in 1977, and assassinated
an assortment of scientists who worked in the Iraqi nuclear program-most
notably the Egyptian scientist Yahya El Mashd, in Paris. Israel
also assassinated the brainchild of the Iraqi Super Cannon project
in Brussels, and bombed the Osiraq Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981.

Israel has repeatedly attempted to weaken
or destroy the Palestinian national movement-particularly in 1970
in Gaza, 1982 in Lebanon, 1987 in the first Intifada, and most
recently in the current Al Aqsa Intifada, which began in September
2000. More than any other movement, the Palestinian national movement
has collectively symbolized and united Arab nationalist aspirations,
and has acted until recently as the main front of Western imperialism's
attacks and control of Arab nationalism.

Israel's relentless war against Arab nationalism
has made it an indispensable ally of the U.S., far and above the
value of any pro-Western Arab proxy regime, regimes whose instability
derives from their illegitimacy in the eyes of their own people.
For these reasons, American military expert-Major General George
Keegan and former air force intelligence officer-has been quoted
as saying that it would cost U.S. taxpayers $125 billion to maintain
an armed force equal to Israel's in the Middle East, and that
the U.S.-Israel military relationship was worth "five CIAs."

Current Israeli Foreign Minister Silvan
Shalon recently confirmed the strategic significance of Israel
for U.S. objectives in the Middle East, in an interview he gave
to Charlie Rose on PBS.

"I think the friendship with Israel
is helping the United States, not less that it's helping us, because
we are sharing so many things in common. We are not sharing only
information and intelligence .... We have been working together
for so many years, and I believe that we are protecting the interests
of the United States in our region. Just try to imagine if Israel
did not exist. If Israel was not there, what would happen in this
region with this hostility towards the United States and towards
the values that it represents? When we are there, we are not letting
those extremists, those fanatics to focus only on the Americans:
they [the fanatics] have to do it with us. I believe that while
we are there we are helping very much the Americans not less than
they are helping us. It is mutual interest of both our countries
and our peoples."

Iraq, oil, empire

Having established Israel's role as the
protector of Western, primarily U.S., imperial objectives, it
is easier to determine how and where the recent invasion and occupation
of Iraq fits into place. Deputy Defense Minister Paul Wolfowitz
himself acknowledged to delegates at an Asian security summit
in Singapore in June 2003 that the invasion of Iraq had nothing
to do with weapons of mass destruction. When asked why the nuclear
power of North Korea was being treated differently from Iraq,
Wolfowitz commented: "Let's look at it simply. The most important
difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically,
we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

Of course it is no secret that oil is
at the heart of the occupation's objectives. American and world
dependence on Gulf oil will increase precipitously over the next
twenty years. Veteran Middle East analyst Anthony Cordesman of
the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)-well
connected to the U.S. intelligence community-describes this dependency
in a document written before the occupation of Iraq:

"We need to remember what our key
strategic priorities are. The U.S. is steadily more dependent
on a global economy and the global economy is steadily more dependent
on Middle Eastern energy exports, particularly from the Gulf.
We tend to take this so much for granted that we sometimes fail
to consider just how serious this dependence is and how much it
is estimated to grow in the future. There also is still a tendency
to view the issue in terms of American import dependence, our
normal peacetime dependence on given countries for imports, and
dependence on direct imports. These are all false approaches to
the problem. We are steadily more dependent on global imports;
what affects the global economy affects us and our direct level
of oil imports is no measure of strategic dependence.

Similarly, we compete for oil on a world
market. Any shortage or price rise in a crisis forces us to compete
for imports on the same basis as every other nation. Finally,
focusing on direct imports of oil ignores the fact that the U.S.
has steadily shifted the pattern of its manufactured imports to
include energy dependent goods, particularly from Asia. These,
in turn, are produced by economies that are critically dependent
on oil imported from the Middle East. Estimates of import dependence
that only include direct imports of crude understate our true
net dependence on oil imports to the point where they are analytically
absurd."

In this regard, Iraq's possession of the
second largest oil serves in the world (with prospects for more),
its weakened position after twelve years of sanctions, and the
openings for the U.S. created after the September 11 attacks and
subsequent "war on terror," all made the invasion of
Iraq a strategic necessity. As the Gulf's share of worldwide petroleum
exports increases to almost 60 percent by 2020, the U.S. has perceived
the need to keep these strategic reserves in a strong U.S. grip
to ensure not only American access to oil, but also U.S. domination
and leverage over potential European and Chinese competitors,
and over world oil markets as a whole. Securing Iraq's oil thus
represents a lynchpin of U.S. imperial objectives. These objectives
were summed up well by Paul Wolfowitz as early as 1992: The U.S.
"must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential
future global competitor .... [We must maintain the mechanism
for deterring potential competitors even aspiring to a larger
regional or global role."

From Iraq to remolding the entire Middle
East

The fact that the U.S. now occupies one
of the Arab world's largest and most historically influential
countries positions it well to not only control Iraq's oil resources
but also to remold the entire region as it sees fit. Bush recently
declared in his weekly radio address, "The establishment
of a free Iraq will be a watershed event in the history of the
Middle East, helping to advance the spread of liberty throughout
that vital region.. . as freedom takes hold in the greater Middle
East, the people of the region will find new hope, and America
will be more secure.""

Details of what precisely the Bush administration
has meant by its version of a new Middle East have been noticeably
vague beyond the predictable rehashed "white man's burden"
rhetoric about bringing freedom and democracy to the people of
the region. But based on what the U.S. is doing in Iraq, together
with other ongoing trends and phenomena in the region, it is now
becoming clearer as to what precisely the U.S. has in mind. These
plans are aimed at addressing both old and new structural weaknesses
and threats to this hegemony, which are increasingly likely to
reveal themselves in the post-invasion of Iraq Middle East.

The Middle East: Legacy of imperialism
and of democracy denied

For some time, the Middle East has been
a veritable cauldron of economic, social, and political discontent
for the Arab working classes, particularly within the U.S.-backed
Arab regimes (Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt, and the entire
Gulf region which includes Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain,
the United Arab Emirates, and Oman, in addition to Yemen). Many
of these problems were more publicly exposed after the publication
of the 2002 and 2003 UN Human Development Reports on the Arab
world. These reports, written by prominent Arab scholars and academics,
reveal how far down the corrupt regimes of the Middle East have
driven their peoples.

Of nine world regions surveyed, the Arab
world topped the list of those populations who most supported
the statement that "democracy is better than any other form
of government," and expressed the highest level of rejection
of authoritarian rule. The UN report is rife with shocking examples
of where the negligence, corruption, and despotism of the Arab
regimes has led: The combined gross domestic product of the twenty-two
Arab League countries is less than that of Spain. Approximately
40 percent of adult Arabs-sixty-five million people are illiterate
(two-thirds of whom are women). If current unemployment rates
persist, regional unemployment will reach twenty-five million
by 2010, representing at least 15 percent in most Arab countries.
Investment in research and development is less than one-seventh
of the world average. Fifty-one percent of older Arab youths expressed
a desire to emigrate to other countries. The Arab world already
suffers from a "hemorrhaging" of large numbers of qualified
Arab professionals who emigrate to the West in search of job opportunities.
Roughly 25 percent of the 300,000 graduates from Arab universities
in 1995-1996 emigrated, and more than 15,000 Arab doctors emigrated
between 1998 and 2000 alone.

U.S. think tanks for years have been warning
of increasing "troubling trends" throughout the Middle
East, which if allowed to fester for too long could be potentially
explosive. But their concern is not with what has been done to
the peoples of the Middle East, but rather the impact of these
trends on U.S. hegemony in the region and on global markets as
a whole. In a remarkable series of documents published by CSIS
entitled "Peace is Not Enough,"" Anthony Cordesman
outlines how these issues simply cannot be ignored. These issues
include "massive economic and demographic problems"
whereby "no Arab country has economic growth that solidly
outpaces its rise in population"; "Population momentum
rates" that "represent a major threat" requiring
"massive birth control programs" (referred to as the
"Population Momentum Bomb"); "Gross overpopulation
and over-urbanization" which may become "critical threats
by 2010-2030"; "Extremely high under and un-employment"
which create "a generation with nowhere to go"; and
a "Youth Explosion Problem" whereby over 40 percent
of the population is 14 years or younger." In the era of
the U.S. occupation of Iraq, Cordesman raises these issues because
they will increasingly threaten the stability of U.S.-backed regimes
across an Arab world which is incensed about U.S. imperial policies
in the region-particularly its backing of Arab dictatorships,
its support for Israel, and the brutal Iraq occupation.

The economic fist behind the military
glove

The U.S. also has other incentives behind
rearranging the economic, political, and social landscape of the
Arab world: neoliberalism. As one analyst from the Cato Institute
Daniel T Griswold bemoans, "The Arab world is a land that
globalization has largely passed by," suffering from an isolation
that "is largely self-imposed. Average tariff barriers in
the Arab Middle East are among the highest in the world, and as
a consequence the region suffers from chronically declining shares
of global trade and investment."

Over the past two decades, the Middle
East's share of world trade has fallen from 13.5 percent in 1980,
to less than 3.4 percent in 2000. Similarly, foreign direct investment
in the Arab world has also steadily declined during this period,
going from 2.6 percent of the world total in 1975-1980, to only
0.7 percent during 1990-1998.' Average tariffs in Algeria are
24 percent, 30 percent in Tunisia, and more than 20 percent in
Egypt-much higher than the average tariffs in the United States,
which hover around 4 percent. Griswold's solution is predictably
clear: "Free trade is not a panacea, but it is a necessary
building block for a more peaceful and prosperous Middle East.
Free trade has helped to reduce poverty in those countries and
regions of the world that have progressively opened themselves
to the global economy. Free trade can till the soil for democracy
and respect for human rights by creating an economically independent
and growing middle class."

It is with this underlying framework that
U.S. policy wonks are approaching the post-invasion of Iraq Middle
East, with the expressed intention of "draining the swamp"
according to one analyst." The U.S. is looking at ways to
push through its "vision" of how the Middle East is
to be remolded economically, politically, and socially-with Iraq
proving to be an important testing ground for these policies.

Details of the U.S. administration's designs
first emerged in May 2003 when Bush outlined a plan to create
a U.S.-Middle East free trade area within ten years "to bring
the Middle East into an expanding circle of opportunity, to provide
hope for the people who live in that region."" When
a reporter from the Economist asked U.S. Trade Representative
Robert Zoellick where Iraq stood in the U.S. vision of the Middle
East Free Trade Agreement (MEFTA), Zoellick was amazingly forthcoming
as to exactly how the U.S. will proceed on this front." After
making the necessary disclaimer,

"The decisions for Iraq ultimately
have to be made by the Iraqi people and a new sovereign government
of Iraq," Zoellick continued by outlining exactly what the
sovereign government is likely to do:

It would certainly be our hope that Iraq
could be one of the engines of a new openness and economic growth
and vitality in the region. My own assessment is you have to walk
before you can run, and at this point, the first step is making
sure one establishes security; it's hard to have a climate for
economic growth without security. Simultaneously the second aspect
has been to work on humanitarian aid as necessary .... Third,
get the oil sanctions lifted and start to get their oil flowing
so as to provide a revenue source. Fourth, we're going to have
to deal with the debt problem whether through forgiveness or rescheduling
because that's a big overhang. Fifth, there clearly needs to be
a reconstruction effort in the traditional term of reconstruction,
building things .... Now, going beyond that, there will also be
the need to develop commercial codes and legal regimes. We and
other countries will be supportive of that. I believe the World
Bank is trying to help with its programs. And that I hope will
create the foundation for the steps on the trade side .... What
would be the next steps on the trade side?... We would like to
qualify Iraq for that Generalized System of Preferences .... And
then I think the next step will be to get Iraq into the WTO. But
those steps obviously have to wait the decisions of the sovereign
Iraq Government!

The erecting of a Middle East Free Trade
Area takes its inspiration directly from the experience of the
past ten years on the Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian front, where
a NAFTA-style maquiladora system was established by creating tax-free
industrial trade zones for local and international capital. The
Palestinian component, though once off to a "healthy start,"
was largely scuttled due to outbreak of the Palestinian Intifada
in September 2000. Yet the "Jordanian experience" continues
to this day, building on the peace treaty it signed with Israel
in 1994, the Qualified Industrial Zones Jordan erected in 1997,
and the free trade agreement it signed with the U.S. in 2000.

By law, only 15 percent of the industries
and companies located in the Jordanian industrial zones are required
to have Jordanian partnership. A full 85 percent of the industry
and its profits therefore go directly to international capital.
Furthermore, investors have the freedom to exploit local cheap
labor and utilize Jordan's land and infrastructure without paying
any taxes or tariffs, thereby destroying local industries that
do not share these perks. The Jordanian industrial zones are also
used as means by which pressure can be applied to other regional
Arab industries to get them to follow a similar neoliberal agenda.
For example, the opening of the Jordanian free trade zone and
the signing of the U.S.-Jordan Free Trade Agreement forced the
Egyptian textile industry to engage in a competitive race to the
bottom.

Not surprisingly, the free trade zones
are also ways through which Israeli investors can move their industries
in search of cheaper labor costs and weaker labor regulation,
while simultaneously enforcing economic normalization. This has
already begun to take place. A main investor in the Prince Hassan
City

Industrial Complex ($15 million) is the
Israeli textile giant Delta Gall Industries, best known for its
underwear business." Delta Galil's CEO Dov Lautman explains
frankly, "There's no way you can sew in any western country,
not even in Israel where labor costs are too high." The average
monthly salary of $1,000 in Israel is incomparable to the $100-$150
that capitalists like Lautman can pay Jordanian women in the industrial
zones. Lautman explains the convenience of the trade zones for
Israeli capitalists like himself, who can leave Tel Aviv by car
at six in the morning, arrive at Irbid in northern Jordan by nine,
and be back in Haifa on the Mediterranean coast by three in the
afternoon. The trade zones are also thought to alleviate the "population
momentum bomb," owing to the fact that the Arab women who
work in the zones for slave wages will be less likely to have
large families if they are employed.

Jordan is the model for the Bush administration's
vision of MEFTA. U.S. trade representative Zoellick has been spearheading
these neoliberal agendas, initially unveiling plans at the World
Economic Forum meeting held in Jordan in June 2003. Zoellick missed
no opportunity at orientalism by declaring, "The United States
aims to brighten the Middle East with as many success stories
as stars in the desert sky. To do so, we are charting a new constellation:
shining lights of trade and investment that offer a clear course
for countries in the region wishing to embark on a journey of
economic openness and reform. He even went so far as to use the
verse from the Koran, "Let there be trading by mutual consent,"
in an op-ed for the Washington Post to shamelessly justify U.S.
neoliberalism across the region.

At the same time, Zoellick did not hold
back from what it was going to take" to get those "stars
in the desert sky" to start shining: "Capital is a coward.
I wish it weren't so, but it is. Frankly, investors have opportunities
all over the world. What does that mean? It means that people
in this region have to make it a hospitable environment, they
have to show people that they can get good returns on the investment,
is this possible? You bet."

Zoellick continued:

How do you improve your environment for
private capital? For one, we can do it by opening our markets
so that people have the opportunity to sell their goods to the
United States, Europe, or other areas of the world. But, the people
in this region have to make the right climate in terms of property
rights, laws, judicial systems. They have to learn the risk premium.
How can you lower the risk and how can we increase the potential
return? The question is really not what favors people can do but
what favors people can do for themselves by creating the environment.
And what we're here to do is to help."

The U.S. free trade zone model is thus
likely to extend from Israel through Jordan, and into Iraq-representing
an uninterrupted chain of U.S. neoliberal regimes from the Mediterranean
to the Arabian Gulf. Free trade agreements similar to the one
signed between Jordan and the U.S. are in the process of being
worked out in Bahrain (to be used as the agent of change in the
Gulf region) and in Morocco (for North Africa).

More pre-packaged "reforms"

In November 2003, the Bush administration
unveiled a plan entitled the Middle East Partnership Initiative
(MEPI), "founded to support economic, political, and educational
reform efforts in the Middle East and champion opportunity for

all people of the region, especially women
and youth ."27 These ideas were elaborated on in a draft
of a leaked U.S. working paper due to be submitted to the Group
of Eight (G8, composed of the U.S., France, Germany, Russia, Italy,
Britain, Japan, and representatives from the European Union) for
its upcoming summit on Sea Island, Georgia in June 2004, and published
in the London-based Al Hayat newspaper on February 13. The document
calls upon the G8 (and not just the U.S.) to "forge a long-term
partnership with the Greater Middle East's reform leaders and
launch a coordinated response to promote political, economic,
and social reform in the region." It does so based upon the
claim that "So long as the region's pool of politically and
economically disenfranchised individuals grows, we will witness
an increase in extremism, terrorism, international crime, and
illegal migration"-a situation which threatens "the
national interests of all G-8 members."

Predictably, the thrust of the draft document
deals with more "economic reforms" aimed at "unleashing
the region's private sector potential," the "primary
engines of economic growth and job creation." The U.S., through
the G8, is attempting to push for "the growth of an entrepreneurial
class in the Greater Middle East [GME] " which "would
also be an important element in helping democracy and freedom
flourish."

The economic initiative calls for the
G8 to "commit to an integrated finance initiative" consisting
of sponsoring microfinance projects (primarily designed to engage
women in the workforce); establish a Greater Middle East Finance
Corporation modeled on the International Finance Corporation (to
"help incubate medium and larger-sized businesses, with an
aim toward regional business integration"); establish a Greater
Middle East Development Bank (GMEDBank) which would act as a "regional
development institution modeled on the European Bank for Reconstruction
and Development (EBRD)," a kind of regional World Bank; create
a "Partnership for Financial Excellence" designed to
"advance reform of financial services" to "better
integrate the GME into the global financial system"; promote
accession into the World Trade Organization (WO); create trade
hubs "focused on improving intra-regional trade and customs
practices" and "Business Incubator Zones (BIZ)."

Complementary to the economic and financial
aspects of these initiatives (which essentially amount to variations
of structural adjustment policies), the U.S. also plans to draw
up a new architecture for political and social infrastructure
as well. Of course, neither the U.S. nor the G8 is serious about
implementing any genuine democratic elections to remove from power
its most trusted allies like King Abdullah of Jordan, King Hassan
of Morocco, or Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. Rather, the plans are designed
to implement some form of nominal democratic reforms (like the
present Jordanian or Moroccan parliaments, which are totally powerless)
that can serve to better buffer genuine democratic sentiment and
popular opposition to governmental policies, while true power
remains with the same kings, princes, emirs, and presidents. At
the same time, social and economic programs are put in place to
foster and promote local "organic" adherents to U.S.
neoliberal political and economic ambitions. Thus, U.S. proposals
include focusing on "promoting democracy and good governance";
encouraging "parliamentary exchange and training programs";
establishing "women's leadership academies"; encouraging
the growth of "civil society," "educational reform,"
"literacy," and textbook translation.

Here too, Iraq and Palestine are proving
to be the training grounds for implementing similar plans across
the entire region. The political and social reforms proposed to
the G8 are similar to the policies implemented in the West Bank
and Gaza during the peace process. During that time (1993-2000)
millions of dollars of international aid poured in from a host
of Western governmental and non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
on projects that ranged from "promoting democracy and good
governance," to "civil society and women's empowerment,"
"media independence," and "grassroots youth programs."

Though there is not enough space to go
into the many levels of what they entailed, an important net effect
of many of these projects was to alienate the grassroots movements
from some of their most capable activists, who were drawn to high
paying jobs (based on the euro or dollar currencies) in various
NGOs and PA ministries, and civil society bodies. The drift of
free-floating organic intellectuals away from grassroots movements
and the political parties they were involved in played a significant
part in destroying much of the Palestinian Left. The absence of
these activists from the Palestinian parties and grassroots organizations
had a damaging effect on the intellectual and organizational infrastructure
of the Palestinian national movement as a whole. Clearly, similar
plans are to be implemented across the Middle East-the U.S. draft
to the G8 calls for an increase in "direct funding to democracy;
human rights, media, women's, and other NGOs in the region"
through bodies like the CIA-created National Endowment for Democracy
and the British Westminster Foundation.

We already have an indication of how these
plans are being implemented within Iraq. Though much attention
has correctly been focused on the "corporate invasion of
Iraq" by large U.S. corporations like Halliburton and Bechtel,
scarcely enough attention has been given to how the U.S. intends
to privatize Iraqi political structures. This is primarily taking
place via a North Carolina-based NGO known as the Research Triangle
Institute (RTI), which was asked by the U.S. Agency for International
Development to bid on a contract to play a formative role in the
creation of Iraq's future local governance, two weeks before the
invasion began. Upon winning the contract, RTI was charged with
setting up 180 local and provincial town councils, a $466 million
contract worth $167.9 million in the first year alone.

As Naomi Klein recently pointed out:

It now turns out that the town councils
RTI has been quietly setting up are the centerpiece of Washington's
plan to hand over power to appointed regional caucuses .... Washington
wants a transitional body in Iraq with the full powers of sovereign
government, able to lock in decisions that an elected government
will inherit. To that end, Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional
Authority is pushing ahead with its illegal freemarket reforms,
counting on these changes being ratified by an Iraqi government
it can control. For instance, on January 31 Bremer announced the
awarding of the first three licenses for foreign banks in Iraq.
A week earlier, he sent members of the Iraqi Governing Council
to the World Trade Organization to request observer status, the
first step to becoming a member. And Iraq's occupiers just negotiated
an $850 million loan from the International Monetary Fund, giving
the lender its usual leverage to extract future economic "adjustments."
Again and again, newly liberated people arrive at the ?oils only
to discover that there is precious little left to vote for. 8

The U.S. seeks to raise these concerns
at the G8 because it wants to ensure that the major capitalist
countries of the world are united in understanding that their
collective interests lie in subverting any revolutionary tendencies
that could emerge in the Middle East. In this regard, the U.S.
is actively soliciting the enlistment of NATO sponsorship for
its plans. "NATO is going to be part of this conversation
about change in the Middle East and NATO has something very important
to offer," U.S. Undersecretary of State Marc Grossman told
reporters in Brussels after a tour to Jordan, Egypt, Morocco,
and Bahrain. "We want to go forward in supporting ideas for
reform, economic reform, political reform, educational reform...
[and] all of those things would be so much more successful if
there's also security and I think NATO has some role to play in
that." Grossman however was quick to allay any fear of neo-imperialism.
"The best ideas will come from the region," he said.
"This is not about the United States or Europe or anyone
else imposing reform on people.""

Conclusion

It is no mistake that the unveiling of
U.S. economic, political, and social objectives in the Middle
East comes on the heels of the display of enormous U.S. military
strength witnessed in the invasion of Iraq, and which was designed
to deter any and all who might think of resisting. Nor is it coincidental
that it comes at a time when the Arab Left is in shambles, and
where one of the only organized centers of social, political,
and military resistance to American ambitions throughout the Middle
East exists largely in the form of various Islamic movements.
These appear to be easily disqualified and-due to racism-are categorically
unacceptable to any U.S. neoliberal capitalist order by large
parts of the U.S. establishment, but also by large sections of
the antiwar movement, too. But this reticence must be quickly
overcome. The Islamic movements-which arose out of the great defeats
of Arab nationalism and the secular Arab Left, by Israel, the
U.S., and U.S.-backed dictators over the last thirty years-are
becoming umbrellas of resistance of all types-nationalist, Islamic,
and even remnants of the Arab Left. They have correctly placed
resisting U.S. imperialism in Palestine and Iraq as their first
priority, and fighting for the self-determination of their peoples.

In this respect, these Islamic movements
need the unconditional support of the U.S. antiwar movement, which
must reject any hair-splitting regarding the nature or character
of this resistance.

Despite the sobering enormity of the challenges
at hand, U.S. activists must not be deterred from taking up the
struggle of resisting U.S. imperialism in Iraq, Palestine, and
throughout the entire Middle East. Before it proceeds however,
it is imperative that the movement engages in this battle with
a clear vision of the issues at hand, and where its responsibilities
lie.

There is no connection between Iraq and
Palestine and their respective occupations unless one can see
them within the framework of U.S. imperialism, and as the product
of U.S. capitalism and its policies around the world. If the U.S.
antiwar movement is to make any gains in resisting the U.S. war
machinery in the Middle East and elsewhere, it is necessary that
the Left of this movement-its anti-imperialist and anticapitalist
backbone-harden itself and set the agenda for change and for resistance.

In this struggle, we must draw inspiration
from the heroic struggles of the Palestinian and Iraqi peoples
who are actively engaged in resisting this war machinery on a
daily basis. At the same time, it is our responsibility to wage
a similar daily battle against this behemoth that creates victims
not only outside the U.S., but also includes the U.S. working
class. Indeed, it is an illusion to think that the American people
do not pay a price for this war as well.

Take for example, the well-publicized
case of Halliburton, the company that has been awarded some of
the most profitable contracts in Iraq to develop its oil infrastructure
and build U.S. military bases there. Halliburton is the same company
that aggressively pushed its tort reform plan designed to cap
asbestos lawsuits in the U.S. by victims of the cancer-causing
asbestos it used in its buildings." Its subsidiary, Kellogg,
Brown and Root (KBR), which is in the process of building the
U.S. bases and forward military posts in Iraq, developed its "skills"
during the prison construction boom of the 1990s, becoming the
second-largest player in prison design and construction in the
United States. Caterpillar, the same company which produces contracting
equipment used today in the demolition of Palestinian and Iraqi
homes (and which killed U.S. citizen Rachel Corrie in Rafah) also
attacks its own U.S. union workers. Likewise, the same skills
used to smash popular large-scale demonstrations developed by
the Israeli military are being utilized by police chiefs of major
U.S. cities, through exchange programs organized by the influential
JINSA think tank, of which Vice President Dick Cheney is a board
member.

It is not enough to calculate the price
paid in lives lost and the amount of tax money spent on the military
industrial complex that could be used for education and health
care in the United States. Nor is it enough to single-out a handful
of corporations that are profiteering off the death, destruction,
and rapacious exploitation of the world's working classes and
the earth's resources. Rather, our resistance must go deeper to
the very fabric of the capitalist system that alienates and exploits,
imprisons, and excludes, bombs, kills, and lies. We must accept
nothing less than the categorical rejection of this system, supporting
the full self-determination of the people in Iraq, Palestine,
and around the world. We must work to build